famous like Meadowlark Lemon

Last night, I finally got to see welfy again. We hadn't seen each other since Thanksgiving. Absence makes the heart grow fonder?

After all the fonding, we went into Boardman for some late-night sushi then came back to her house. See, for the past couple of weeks, Welf has been working on a gift for me for Christmas. I have been aware that all of our mutual friends have been in on the secret for some time thanks to a series of LiveJournal entries from which I was filtered. All I knew until this point is that all of her friends thought it was the most awesome present ever. It made people cry. People were jealous.

So for the past couple of weeks I've been referring to this forthcoming gift as "The Present of Weeping and Envy". Needless to say, it was a gift with a reputation that preceded it. It now was being given with high-exepctations.

For Christmas, Welf made for me a scrapbook. But not just any scrapbook. It's only the most perfect, awesome, and best scrapbook in the history of scrapbooks. I'm sure some of you are thinking this overly enthusiastic boyfriend hyperbole.

You haven't seen it. But you can. Thanks to Welf's work-in-progress photos for her LJ entries, there is an entire gallery devoted to the scrapbook, from start to finish. For the purposes of this entry, I'll give you just a taste....

It's a brief history of our time together, pieced together with photos and words from songs, poems, and our own LiveJournals. For instance, she brought to life the LiveJournal comment conversation which lead to our first meeting. It even has our user icons!

It is an amazing book from beginning to end; amazing in concept, amazing in design.

But most of all, it's amazing in its thoughtfulness. Of course, I'd expect nothing less. It came from an amazing person.

I considered commercial art when I was 15, and was going to transfer to Vo-Tech, but decided against it because they didn't have marching band or musicals, and the Vo-Tech has minimal windows and that made me uneasy. :^)